10-day BRITAIN AT WAR

After our orientation dinner in London, we will spend the next few days visiting the most important sites of the British war effort and the development of Operation Overlord. This leg focuses on World War II in England. In our exploration of London, Bletchley and Uxbridge, we will have the chance to investigate the war effort, discover its underlying tensions, interact with the innovations it brought about, and pay our respects to the combined efforts of the Allied troops. At Bletchley Park, the main center of the British codebreaking during World War II, you will marvel at the intellectual achievements of the Ultra intelligence agents to decipher the secret communications of the Axis Powers. We visit the medieval Dover castle and its underground tunnel system that functioned as an air-raid shelter, underground hospital and military command center during the war.

We travel to the southern coast of England, where we will experience the D-Day Story museum in Portsmouth before visiting the planning site of the Normandy Landings. You will have the chance to walk on board of the last surviving Landing Craft Tank from D-Day and to see the Overlord Embroidery, the modern-day counterpart of the Bayeux Tapestry telling the story of D-Day. We spend an entire day exploring the vehicular inventions at the Tank Museum in Bovington, that also houses the largest collection of tanks in the world including Tiger 131 the world’s only running Tiger I tank. Our visit to Portsmouth would not be complete without seeing the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard that is home to HMS Victory, Lord Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, plus the HMS Warrior and many more.

During the last leg of our journey back towards London, we stop at one of the most famous landmarks in the United Kingdom, the prehistorical standing stones of Stonehenge, regarded as a British cultural icon. Our last stop will be at Littlecote House that was the regimental headquarters for the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. Easy Company was part of this regiment, and they took off from here during the night of June 5-6, 1944 as part of the Normandy Landings. From Littlecote House, we will travel back to London where the tour ends with a chance for reflection and community over a farewell dinner. The next day, our Passengers are brought to London Heathrow airport for their return flights.